| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: altars. {16} You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of
Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's
chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva;
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with
bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which you
have not trampled coal ashes into {17}--nor any foreign city in
which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old
streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels
and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poets
used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-
garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: I; she gave me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a
flash of two bronze-colored braids, into the next car.
Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the
uncertain frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure.
The mountain air flapped my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one
match burned to the end and went out, and still I stared. For I
had seen on her expressive face a haunting look that was horror,
nothing less. Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have
to be written large before I can read them. But a woman in trouble
always appeals to me, and this woman was more than that. She was
in deadly fear.
The Man in Lower Ten |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs
engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled
in a shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They
were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in
the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted
and refined them that they made record of things never before
perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their
separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on
the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves
and the veining of each leaf -- he saw the very insects upon
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
